I recognized the voice. It belonged to Miss Morris who lived just up the hill from us. She was an old woman; much older than my mother. Mr. Morris had been even older. As far I knew he’d always been old. Now, presumably, he was dead. I heard my mother scurrying about in the kitchen and then out the door. Standing on my bed, I looked through the open slat windows toward our gate. There was Miss Morris, wringing her hands in her apron, waiting as my mother hurried to her.

I couldn’t make out what was being said, but Miss Morris was pointing and gesturing and, it seemed to me, she was crying. Mama put an arm around the older woman’s shoulder and gave her a pat on the back. When Miss Morris turned to go back up the hill, Mama came back to the house. I watched the tiny old woman trudge back to her little cottage. Her reddish-brown skin clung tightly to her bones. Each step she took appeared to require great effort. She was so thin; a strong breeze might carry her off the mountain, sending her sailing across the valley below. Her wavy, greying hair was pulled back as it usually was, but this morning there seemed to be several strands sticking out in odd directions. Miss Morris normally looked a bit frail to me, but on that day she was almost feeble.

“David,” Mama called to me from the kitchen. “Come out here. I goin’ up Miss Morris house. Mr. Morris dead this mornin’ and she need me help.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, coming out of my bedroom.

There was no use telling my mother that I could hear perfectly well through the open windows when people were yelling things from the road. Grown people liked to pretend that they had more privacy than was actually the case. By now, all the neighbours surely knew that Mr. Morris had died. People liked to say that the “bush have ears”, explaining how gossip spread about. Even as a boy I knew that bush didn’t have ears. Voices carry on the mountain, especially with everyone living in their open-air houses and shouting in the road. There were few secrets in our neighbourhood.

“I’ll prob’ly be gone for a while, David. You stay out of trouble. When Daddy come home, you tell him ‘bout Mr. Morris. Yuh ‘ear me?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll tell him.”

When Mama went out the door, I stood in the kitchen and waited a few minutes. I gave her enough time to get out of sight before I ran out into the yard. Devon, my best friend from next door, was already waiting under our giant rubber tree, just as I’d expected. The rubber tree was our usual meeting spot. It never occurred to me that he wouldn’t already know about Mr. Morris and, of course, he did.

“Yuh ‘ear say Mistah Morris dead?” Devon asked, though he most certainly knew that I did.

“Yeah, mon. Mi know a’ready. Mama gone up dere fi see.”

Neither of us had to ask what we should do next. Instinctively, the way only young boys can do, we knew what the other was thinking. Without a word, we left the yard and darted across the road. Disappearing into the bush, we followed a path that would wind around to the back of the Morris’ little wooden cottage. When you’re going to sneak a look at a dead man, it would hardly do to announce yourself at the front gate. That sort of impertinence would get you little more than a box on the ears.

Down through the gully and up the hill, we made our way into Mr. Morris’ back garden. We’d snuck into his yard this way many times. At the back of his property were his prized coffee trees. The green coffee beans were the perfect ammunition for the homemade blowguns we made from plastic pipes. Mr. Morris was the only person in our area with coffee trees, so when the season came, we would creep up to grab as many handfuls as we could before he, inevitably, spied us. Each time it was the same. Shaking his machete in the air, he would rain down obscenities on us, careful to let us know in no uncertain terms what type of worthless children come and rob the fruits of another’s labours. Each time, we would panic and tear through the bush, making our get away down the gully side. Once in relative safety, we would laugh and congratulate ourselves, pretending that we’d never been scared. As furious as he would get, Mr. Morris never told our parents. Maybe he had been a young boy once, though it barely seemed possible.

When Devon and I reached Morris’ yard, we hesitated. Looking around, we almost expected the little white man to jump from behind a banana tree. Not this time, though. Mr. Morris was dead, a fact we intended to confirm with our own eyes. We stood idle for a few moments that seemed like hours. Naturally, we wanted to see the dead body. We’d never seen one before. Mustering our courage, however, required a bit of time. Devon picked a guava from a nearby tree, as we shuffled about the garden. Mr. Morris had every manner of fruit growing in his yard. After a life spent in agriculture, he had retired as a gardener. People said he could put rock stone in the earth and it would grow. That was a strange thing to say, I thought, but Mr. Morris was a strange kind of man.

While we loafed about, I remembered one particular day when I was walking home from school. I had passed by Mr. Morris sitting on a wall talking to Mr. Lewis from down the road. I was surprised to hear the men speaking to each other in what I thought sounded like Spanish. It was a peculiar scene, these two Jamaican men, one white and one black, talking in Spanish, as if it were a normal thing to be doing. It was peculiar enough that I reported it to Daddy as we ate supper that evening. According to Daddy, when Mr. Lewis and Mr. Morris were young men they had worked the cane fields in Cuba. That’s where they learned to speak Spanish. Even now, they spoke it to each other from time to time, especially when they didn’t want anyone to know what they were saying. Later, I’d told Devon that we should go cut cane in Cuba, so we could learn Spanish. Then we could talk all type of slackness and never get caught.

Devon was a year older than me, so he knew things that I didn’t know. He told me how no one goes to cut cane in Cuba anymore, but he did have an uncle that worked the cane fields in Florida. The problem was, most of the workers there were Jamaicans and Haitians, so there wasn’t much chance of learning Spanish. His uncle told him that the Jamaicans didn’t get along well with the Haitians and there was lots of quarrelling and fighting. Plus, cutting the sugar cane is hard, hard work. That didn’t sound like much fun after all, so we decided we wouldn’t go foreign to cut cane when we grew up. We’d have to find something else to do when we went to foreign.

After eating our fair share of guavas, we ran out of reasons to procrastinate further. If we were going to see a dead body, we’d have to get on with it. We moved slowly to the back of the plank board cottage, careful not to disturb the chickens pecking around the yard. This was the only wooden house in our neighbourhood. Most of us lived in stucco houses, built of concrete blocks. Farther down the hill, back off the road, some families lived in tiny shacks made of zinc, bamboo and whatever else they could find. Only the Morris’ lived in a proper wooden house, although the brightly painted colours had long since faded. Mr. Morris was too old to be out painting his house every time the sun bleached the colour. The last time he got a hole in his zinc roof, Daddy climbed up there to mend it for him. Mr. Morris was a proud man, though, so he didn’t make a habit of asking people to paint or fix his house. Mostly, it just deteriorated, much like he and Miss Morris.

On the back part of the house, there were small gaps in the boards that Devon and I thought we might be able to see through. In truth, though, we didn’t know what we would see. Neither of us had ever been inside the Morris’ house. I couldn’t recall anyone going inside the house, except for Miss Morris’ niece. She sometimes came to visit from Spanish Town, but not very often. Neighbours stopped by occasionally and talked outside and, of course, children would sneak around stealing coffee and fruit, but Mr. and Miss Morris were alone most of the time. We were about to find out what the inside looked like, though, as we crept right up to the back wall.

There wasn’t enough room for both of us to spy at once, so Devon went first. Squatting down on his knees, he turned his head sideways to squint through the crack in the wall. After only a few seconds, he jumped up, falling backwards over himself. I held my breath; looking into Devon’s wide eyes, sure that he’d given us away. We froze in place, waiting to see if we’d been detected. When no one came to chase us away, we scurried back into the garden.

“Mi see ‘im,” Devon burst out, barely able to maintain a whisper. “Mi see him ‘pon the bed, like say ‘im sleepin’. Bwoy, him look still and white like a duppy. Go look. Him dead fi true.”

“Wha’ Miss Morris and mi mother ah do? Yuh see dem?”

“Mi nah know. Dem jus’ a walk ‘round and ting. Mr. Morris ah lay down ‘pon the bed with him hand by him side, so. Him is a real, real dead man, David.”

Quietly, I crept over to look through the crack in the wall. The light inside was dim, so it took my eyes several seconds to adjust. There was my mother and Miss Morris leaning over the bed, blocking my view of everything but Mr. Morris’ legs. He was dressed in black trousers and what looked like his Sunday shoes, though I’d never seen him in church.

“You don’t have another one?” I heard my mother asking.

“No, is the only white one mi have,” Miss Morris answered. “It will have to do. Mek sure it tight.”

Mama seemed to be struggling with something, bent over Mr. Morris’ dead body there. I wished she would move so I could get a better look. In the meantime, I glanced around at what little I could see of the room. An old weathered bureau stood against one wall. On top were a few faded pictures in tarnished frames. One photo was a white man and woman, with a little baby. It couldn’t be Mr. Morris. The picture looked aged, but not old enough to be a young Mr. Morris. I was reminded of something I’d heard Mama and Daddy talking about once.

“What a shame,” my mother had said. “You know dat Mr. Morris have two children by him first wife? Both of them gone a foreign and nevah set foot back in Jamaica. Not once dem come look for dem father.”

That must be one of his children in the picture, I thought. When I grow up and move to foreign, I’ll come back and visit my parents, I told myself. I wondered if his children even knew he was dead. How could they? The Morris’ didn’t own a phone and he’d just died that morning. I guessed that they wouldn’t come, anyway. When you move to foreign you probably get too busy to think about your old father, sitting on wall down there in Jamaica talking Spanish with his old time friends. Maybe you forget what it’s like to walk up and down gully side, picking guava and stealing people’s coffee beans. Some people may just want to grow up and forget about all of that; just move to foreign where they don’t have to sleep in tin roof houses with faded paint on the walls. In America or England, I was sure; they wouldn’t put your old, dead daddy on the bed and tie handkerchief around his head to keep his mouth shut.

As it turned out, that’s what my mother had been doing. When she finally stood up straight and stepped away from the bed, she declared that it should be tight enough. I assumed she meant the handkerchief, tied under Mr. Morris’ chin and over his head top. Now that she was out of the way, I had my first good look at a dead man. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I couldn’t muster the same enthusiasm that Devon had shown. Maybe I’d been thinking too much about worthless children that move away and forget their parents. I don’t know, but looking at Miss Morris, sitting heavy in her chair, wringing her hands, it was hard to get excited about seeing a dead body.

“Miss Bailey,” the old woman was saying. “Yuh can stay here when mi go make funeral arrangement? Some a de people dem swear say Mr. Morris have nuff money hide ‘way here. I don’ waan nobody come in mi house, Miss Bailey. I don’ waan nobody come in and trouble mi tings dem.”

“Yes, yes, of course. I’ll stay right here. When Mr. Bailey come home, I’ll make him carry you go town in him van.”

Devon was poking me in the arm, demanding another turn to look. I kissed my teeth at him and motioned for him to move. “Cha, man,” I whispered. “Me nuh done yet. G’way nuh.”

I was looking at Mr. Morris, lying so still on his bed. He looked odd, but not just from having that handkerchief tied around his head. He was whiter than usual; a little blue here and there. Though Mr. Morris was, in fact, a white man, years of working in the sun had given his skin a tanned, weathered look. In death, his complexion was pale and ashy. It made me wonder what I’d look like when I died. I didn’t know how old Mr. Morris was, but he’d not been as frail as his wife. He was lean, with tough, sinewy arms. When he moved, you could see his veins and muscles rippling under his taut skin. Daddy once said that Mr. Morris was strong like an ox. It was only his old bones that kept him from moving around like a young man. Now he didn’t look so strong at all. He looked tired. I wasn’t sure how a dead man could look tired, but he did.

“Come nuh, David,” Devon was talking too loud. “Mek mi get a turn.”

Aggravated, I crawled out of the way so Devon could have another look. It wasn’t fair of me to take so long. I knew that, but there was no telling when I’d have another chance to see a dead body. We were too young to know that, over the years, we would see more than enough. Anyway, it was my mother in there with Miss Morris. Tonight, while in bed, I could eavesdrop on her and Daddy as they talked about everything that happened today. She might even say something about those worthless children that don’t give a damn how their daddy died in his little wood house with cracks round the back where little boys can peep through. As I let Devon take his turn spying through the slats, I felt even less excited than before. I wasn’t sure why, exactly, but I was feeling a little lonely.

Mr. Morris had never talked much to us neighbourhood children. Most of the time, he just yelled and shook his machete at us. Admittedly, that was only when we were thieving things from his yard. Still, something seemed wrong about taking this for a game, coming here to peep through wallboards at the dead man in his bed. Meanwhile, there was poor old Miss Morris sitting in that chair like she might never get up. I went and sat down under a mango tree, waiting for Devon. When he finally got an eye full, we walked toward the path that would lead back through the bush, through the gully and on to our houses. As we passed the coffee trees at the back of the garden, Devon looked at me with a mischievous grin.

“David,” he nodded toward the trees. “When coffee time come again, bwoy, we can get whole heap ah coffee beans fi we blow gun dem. Nobody ah go stop us now.”

“Yeah,” I answered. “We’ll see, but mi think say mi ah get too big fi dem tings, yuh know?”

He just shrugged at me and wrinkled his nose up. Devon was a year older than me, so sometimes he knew things that I didn’t know. Walking back down the gully path that day, leaving Mr. Morris’ little bleached out wooden cottage behind us; it occurred to me for the first time that sometimes, maybe, I knew things that Devon didn’t know.
.
•••

“Of Contracts with Gods” is taken from Bethel’s latest book, Bougainvillea Ringplay
(Peepal Tree, 2009).

•••

Now the next step is highly controversial. If you once wore ‘Earth’ shoes, utter the name ‘Greenpeace’ in the same breath as the ‘Beatitudes’, and believe that the movie ‘Free Willy’ is the most important statement of the 20th century, you will walk through the property tying red ribbons around the strongest and most beautiful of the native Bahamian trees. This tells the tractor operator what you want to leave standing.

If you are the other type of Bahamian to whom ostentation is most important, you will level the property to ensure maximum space for ‘concrete’ expansion. Whichever class of Bahamian you belong to, you will probably plant fruit trees extensively, and take your family to gaze fondly at your ‘piece of the rock’ each weekend from time of purchase straight through the construction process.

How should the ‘true-true’ Bahamian house look? Think about the Ford automobiles of the late fifties. The accent is on big and noticeable with plenty of glazing. Some of us would incorporate chrome into our exterior design, as well, if we could but find a way. Try, by all means, to afford hilltop property or large acreage, but don’t despair if you can’t. Squeezing a 4,000 square foot, two-storied, balconied house on a 50′ x 100′ lot will have much the same impact.

If your pocket dictates a small bungalow, painting the exterior in a rainbow colour will attract just as much notice. No need for timidity in the area of colour for a Bahamian house. Walls of Tyrian purple, and of no less bright Florida orange may be considered tasteless elsewhere, but are certainly not unknown here.

For increased presence, don’t neglect the advantage of having decorative finials for the pillars of the walls enclosing your property. The more discreet among us usually settle for the traditional pineapple ornament or a practical lamp. Those of more Napoleonic vision go in for winged victories and lions rampant. Those totally lacking in taste go so far as to gild them.

Most of the foregoing excesses are committed most often by the newly or unexpectedly rich. When the money has aged considerably, Bahamians like their houses to match. We therefore resort to beautiful Bahamian Georgian architecture either by imitation or by buying the homes of old colonial barons or winter residents who have moved to more secluded islands in the Bahamas chain or further south to islands too small to appear on standard maps.

•••

Excerpted from How to Be a True-True Bahamian, Guanima, 1994

•••

In the meantime, though, Patti’s words will have to do. And they will do very well—what is a writer, after all, more than words on the page (or screen)?

•••

TOTO: Why do you write?

PGM: I write for the same reason I read and delve into history—it is a compulsion. I have always loved words, as my mother did. I love the creative power that words yield. When I discover books by authors who are tuned into this ever-expanding universe of meaning and beauty, I read them over and over again. I’ve read Flaubert’s Madame Bovary four times at least. I feel the same way about Roumain’s Governeurs de la Rosée and Carpentier’s El Reino de Este Mundo.

TOTO: Who are your poetic influences?

PGM: I don’t know that I can say honestly that I have poetic influences. I so strongly repudiate a notion that is increasingly promulgated by people in the creative community; that is, you have to be slavish to the doings in poetic America or what you do is no good. When I’m impelled to commit a feeling or thought to poetry, I simply do the things I like and find pleasant. My spirit is contradictorily fed by euphony and cacophony. I just like what sensory images can do, so I spend a lot of time on word choice and alliterative and other sound devices. If I feel like a form of rhyme, I use it and the devil take the hindmost. The highest of the poetic pundits can frown on it and I won’t be shaken. Writing is very personal—to be at its best, it has to echo something in your own soul.

What I can best do in answer to your question is to list a few poets who have touched my life and I continue to find profound:

Were they truer, the old songs
when the law was far away,
when the veiled queen, her girth
comfortable as cushions,
upheld the orb with its stern admonitions?
We wait for the changing of statues
the change of parades.
—Derek Walcott, “Parades, Parades”

You can’t beat this can you? From the time I studied Spanish Golden Age Literature for two years at University, I have loved the Spanish and English Mystics. I have just reread John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV—you know—”Batter my heart three-person’d God…/Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,/Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.”

Poets from our region have a freshness and power that play music on my spine.

and what would life be like without

Shakespeare
Emily Dickinson
W. H. Auden
Baudelaire
Verlaine

and so many others. Thank God they didn’t listen to their parents to devote themselves to the ‘received’ professions!

And hot diggidy, I love love what’s happening right here in The Bahamas with our women poets!

TOTO: Chinua Achebe famously wrote that “art for art’s sake is just another piece of deodorized dog shit.” What is the role of the poet in society?

PGM: Achebe is entitled to his views. We don’t have to agree. I believe that a poet ought to be as rounded as any other citizen. I’m happy with art for art’s sake, when the soul just feels like blowing beauty like that a fresh rain draws from summer earth. At the same time, poets must use a gift that can have enormous impact to draw attention to those things that must change, such as injustice, discrimination, etc. These days my poems are very much concerned with calling attention to injustices that we direct against our fellow beings for no better reason than our insecurity on this planet can only be relieved by feeling superior to at least one other person. But then I have also written stuff just to play with words and to rock with inner glee e.g. “On the Effects of a Note Played by Wynton Marsalis”. Can’t tell you the fun I had with that one!

TOTO: Some people believe that poetry is an outdated art form, especially poetry written for the page, which has been supplanted by the spoken word. What is your view on this position?

PGM: There are those who would discard books because of Kindle and I hardly read poetry in Nassau nowadays to young audiences because so many only want poems about sex and revolution set to rap. And then, why is that people always must elevate what they are best at and scurrilously bad mouth that which they don’t do well at by calling it passe, old hat? Many spoken word poets are excellent and there are some whose meagre light would do better hidden under a bushel. The same goes for those who make use of the written forms. The readiness to discard things that have come before is a point of departure that is insidious and will cut off its nose to the despite of its face. I’m all for innovation, but who could be so dull of soul as to think the great new and the great old cannot coexist? Should we discard Michaelangelo’s David or think it any less magnificent because we are awed by the works of Henry Moore at Kew? It is as bad as those visual artists who prefer abstraction and now regularly condemn figuration as “pretty, pretty” and therefore worthless. How can any form that has propelled men, women and children to explore and elevate the best in themselves, that has helped people to see their situations with greater clarity, to endure, be unworthy? There are poems I read and learned in childhood that still inspire me and that I hope will endure to the end of the world.

TOTO: What do you dream for tomorrow?

PGM: I dream of a truly, confidently literate Bahamas—a country where we will take joy and search out word art as ardently as we pursue junkanoo and music; a country in which creatives don’t have to pretend to see the emperor clothed when he is obviously naked, to follow trends from without rather than from within and condemn those who, like the small boy, will have none of this pompous falsity. I want to see a Bahamas where we can count yearly on the appearance of great fora, journals, books, etc. For this we need more cooperative efforts, more good critics, more readers, more literature in our schools, shared by teachers who have the skill and appreciation to bring literature to life and share it with their students as an essential element of their development.

Thank you for allowing me to share in your very necessary forum for the exchange of ideas.

•••

The note
high-born, sassy
lording it in the ranks
of tonal revolution
somewhere above
high C,
screamed its freedom
hovering for a moment
over Miss Rose’s
dozing
blue-haired friends.

Then, that clean, bold sharp
skated down the scale
still sweet enough
to pierce the soul
and, swift as a kick
from her Harry’s customary brew,
collided with a soulmate
deep in Miss Rose’s
repressed, somnolent heart
a place Harry had never touched
in forty years
of shared bills
shared children
and now shared blood pressure pills
because he didn’t even
couldn’t even know
because Rose herself didn’t know
it was there.

For a moment
just for a moment
she sat
panicked
clinging
to the outcropping
of unyielding rock
that was her life
a stony face
barren, silent
except for stubby growths
of myrrh
and the cackle
of predatory Bingo crows
a plateau
that adamantly refused
to sprout peaks of ecstasy.

Sitting tight
In the narrow confines
of her skinny, dry tower
wrapped for warmth
in her thick coat of dusty doctrine
and a patrimony of prejudice
Miss Rose felt
the heavy moist note
seep through unguarded cracks
and trembled
when it burst into
quivering semiquavers
of startling arpeggios.

One more blast of the trumpet
and Rose’s Jericho
lay bare
open to ravishing
by passion’s virile Joshua.
Then
that monumental emotion
camouflaged so well
by electronic wizardry
heated her innards
to incandescence
melting her
stainless steel will
loosening the whalebone corset
of adamant denial
that stifled her heart
admitting that gigolo of a note.

Miss Rose yelped
like a scalded lap dog
unused to injury.
She thus spoke her first word
in the language of passion
unuttered in forty years
of marriage to a man
sparing of words
in any tongue.
And she wed
by a priest of England
not a local upstart.

She felt her vital juices
flow from the centre of her gut
hot and sweet
like her orange-tinged barbecue sauce
to tingle every extremity.
“Resurrection…” she gasped
her breath snagged
in the invisible net of sound
swinging between
woofers and tweeters.
“This is what the Great Getting-up
Morning is gonna feel like.”

Galvanized
by the volcanic mudslide
down the monolith
of her soul
Miss Rose
to her absolute horror
rose from her chair
and right in front
of all her blue-haired friends
she let that hungry silver note
sweet talk her pelvis.
From some unidentified
hotspot in that concavity
rose a wave of rapture
riding her neural pathways
until her whole body
pulsed in the giant
slow, rhythmic S’s
of a suspension bridge
whose point of harmonic resonance
has been attained.
The torrid pas seul ended
when Miss Rose’s
long, slow shudder
jerked to a stop
with a jolting thrust of her hips
in a bump and grind
Josephine Baker
would have died
to call her own.

A blue-haired eye
popped open:
Sweet Jesus,
Rose having the spirit
Or doing a obeah dance!
The single eye
startled
remained ajar
stuck fast
by the glue of surprise.

Just for a moment
no—just for the interstice
between seconds
Miss Rosie, gospel-hall gracious
ever careful of character
her rhythms long ago adjusted
to march tunelessly
in time to the lugubrious fugue
of her father’s values
the two-finger “Chopsticks”
of Harry’s aspirations
the querulous stingy staccato
of a critical community,
had vibrated like a tuning fork.
Her resonance to that note
a deep, foundation-rattling rising
would have been unbearable
if sustained by that ill-used
instrument.

But though brief
the reverberation
of inner space
was wild enough
free enough
to share chords with the universe
and show Miss Rose
what it was
just to be.

•••

Originally published in No Vacancy in Paradise, Guanima Press, 2001

•••

•••